Well, an alternative reading of this is "maybe we can solve some of the same problems with IndieWeb principles instead of ActivityPub."

https://www.indieweb.org

These are not "hacked up RSS"; they're just RSS (well, more often Atom or JSON Feed) combined with other technologies like webmentions. These are all, like ActivityPub, IETF recommendations/standards. I've mentioned Micro.blog before, but it's worth mentioning again: it's a centralized server producing a Twitter-esque timeline, but the sources of posts might be individual blogs using any number of different blogging engines. When I post articles to my WordPress site, people can reply on Micro.blog and have those replies show up both in their timelines and as actual comments on my blog. (And in fact, behind the scenes, a "hosted" Micro.blog site is actually using all the same technologies, with Jekyll as the blog engine.)

As much as I like many things about Mastodon, I'm not convinced that it's a superior philosophy to Micro.blog's; the dark cloud to federation's silver lining is that the admins of any instance that your social graph connects to (that is, you follow someone on that instance and/or vice-versa) can break those connections without warning and with no recourse to you, beyond moving to another instance and hoping it doesn't happen again.

And, speaking more generally, I think the author definitely has some points that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand: it's possible that ActivityPub might indeed be better than other feed protocols at solving certain problems, but it's worth looking at each use case and asking if that's really true in this case. PeerTube might be one that ActivityPub excels at and that feeds don't, for instance. (I don't see anything about PeerTube's implementation that proves what it's doing with ActivityPub couldn't be done just as easily with, say, JSON Feed, but I haven't dug into that.)

The micro.blog way of doing it is really confusing, if I post something on my blog it shows up in micro.blog and then people can comment there and it shows up on my blog (in theory, in practice it never did for me, I never got a webmention from there), but now I want to answer on one of those comments and I have no idea how. If I do it as a comment post on my blog it never reaches those people from micro.blog, so the only way to do it is to externalize commenting to micro.blog and thus not being able to own my own content anymore, which is what micro.blog was advertising for all the time. Same with "likes", etc.

I think the main draw of Mastadon is that it's an intentional experience, with blessed clients, discovery, etc etc. I'm unlikely to read anyone's blog if it's not put in front of me somehow. Furthermore, all I need to do to interact is install the client; I don't need my own site to do it.

Overall I think your argument is very strong if you can provide a comparable experience to mastadon. If not, then it's not clear why the benefits are worth it.

Micro.blog proves it's possible to provide a comparable experience--in some ways I prefer it, although that has much more to do with its aesthetics and nascent culture than any underlying technology. At any rate, if your blog is hosted on Mastodon itself, you don't even have to know it's a blog, per se--you can just use it exactly like Twitter.

The catch right now is that Micro.blog is a paid service. I don't see any reason why someone couldn't set up something very similar built on the same tech--other than, of course, the willingness to put in the time and money. :)

I've lost too much time messing around with rdf. Recently I was scraping some activitypub feeds and I was actually thinking "why the fk can't this just be an RSS feed?"

Most of the grief regarding ActivityPub vs RSS is that they are enough similar that a migration path could have been made where RSS gets an upgrade and could maybe be a bit compatible with ActivityPub rather than just ignoring RSS and creating ActivityPub without a clear upgrade path.